The field of search engine optimisation is considered to be one of the most tedious endeavors in the field of online business. This is may be attributed with the fact that there are several strategies that could be employed without any certainty in its results. Search engine optimisation could sometimes be considered as a hit or miss market as it would be common for one in the SEO business to fail and learn. The main target of search engine optimisation are the search engines this is why it is very important for an SEO company or an SEO consultant to be familiarised with the search engine both its backend processes as well as its front end or the physical appearance. It is only by understanding the physical appearance can an SEO company or an SEO consultant be able to decipher the actual results being shown by the search engine via its search engine results page. SEO companies and SEO consultants should familiarise themselves with their target application as it would definitely be the basis of their entire SEO campaign.
First Stop is the front-end part of a search engine, search engines may vary in design and in features but there will always be common features that may be found among all the search engine sites, and by understanding these similarities or common features one can readily interpret any results that may be shown by the search engine which may be relevant to the SEO research being conducted.
First part is the most common among all the search engines and that is the search box or sometimes called the query box. The query box or search box is where the users would enter or input their query strings or keywords, this is usually found at the center of the search engine and such location is common among all search engines.
The second part is the Search refinements or the specific search feature, this feature usually is found at the left column of the search engine results page and its purpose is to help users narrow down their search depending on the given category.
Another important part of a Search engine is the organic results page, this page of course would display the natural or organic search results based on the most optimised and relevant sites with that of the keywords entered.
Finally the Paid results page is also an integral part of the search engine page or results page, this is found usually at the top of the organic results list, this is because the search engines would give much importance to those that have paid for their site to be listed in page 1 of the most relevant keyword utilised by the user.
This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a glossy icon like the one shown below using Illustrator.
Open up Illustrator and select the Rounded Rectangle Tool from the Tools menu and draw a square with a 12mm corner radius. Hold Shift while drawing the shape to make a perfect square and click once of the canvas, with the tool selected, to change the corner radius.
Give the shape a nice strong colour, in this case I have used #C42A2A, then copy the shape, cut and Paste In Front and scale down to about 90% the size. Give the new shape a gradient of pure black to white at an angle of 90 degrees and set the Transparency to Screen and Opacity to 40% as shown below.
Now copy the first solid coloured shape, cut and Paste In Front, then scale the shape down to around 80% the size as shown below.
Now copy the second shape, the one that has the gradient, cut and paste the copied shape in front and your icon container is now created.
Now simply add your chosen icon to the center of the shape, in this instance it is a question mark in Arial font.
Sometimes we all wonder if changing our domains URL will benefit our SEO campaigns? recently SEO Positive have changed from our 3 year .com domain to a more UK specific .co.uk and successfully implemented a way of doing so seamlessly.
When changing a URL it really comes down to the direction of your old visitors to your new url and we decided the best solution as the site was not changing physically was to 301 each and every page, but with any ReWriteRule you can’t just write 900 separate rules to achieve this so I cam up with a clever little rewrite rule of my own to automatically redirect with the page name attached so all pages are technically the same.
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seopositiveltd.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The above code is very simple and for any regular expression new comer the explanation of each line is below
Options +FollowSymLinks
All this does is tell the Apache to follow symbolic links (links that don’t hold any physical value, as in the file is missing)
RewriteEngine on
This tells Apache that it should initialise the mod_rewrite module ready for usage, and the final piece to the puzzle is the below code.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seopositiveltd.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The first part “(.*)” tells Apache that the file we want to redirect is a simple wildcard for everything, the second part is the url we want to redirect to appended with $1, this is the internal ID set by Apache to the wildcard search. The third and final part is the method in which to redirect R=301 means to redirect the file with a 301 header meaning “Moved Permanently” and the “L” at the end means this is the LAST redirect rule allowed to initiate.
Happy transferring!
The Uniform Resource Locator or the URL which is also known as the website’s address is another area where SEO companies and SEO consultants should devote time to when optimising the entire website. The Uniform Resource Locator is very much part of the website although it is not part of the design itself. The URL is being utilised by search engines as the conduit to crawl into the different pages of the website and for some websites using content management system one of the main issues is the fact that the URL of the different pages of the website is not search engine friendly. In order to make the web page easy to crawl for search engine bots and crawlers it is imperative that the web page address or the URL be easy to crawl, the following are some tips that could optimise your website’s URL’s.
1. Utilise words in your uniform resource locators when developing the pages of your website, use words that will be descriptive of the content of the webpage but you also have to take note not to use lengthy and unnecessary parameters. Incorporating keywords in your URL may be fine as long as you do not overdo it and that it is still descriptive of the web pages content.
2. When developing your web page and uploading your files into the web host it would be prudent to make a simple directory structure, this is to easily tell search engine crawlers and your website visitors on the location of the files that they are viewing avoid nesting the filed too deep by placing it in several subdirectories.
3. Avoid creating two versions of your Uniform Resource Locator as this will split your web pages’ reputation and for Google it would split your websites’ page ranking.
Following these three guidelines could help increase the search engine optimisation campaign for your target site yielding quality and desirable results.
One of the most important element for a website is usability, this entails the ease of navigation for the website. It is important to incorporate easy website navigation because this will increase the efficiency of user experience thus preventing the visitors of your website from navigating away from your website. Search engines also favour good navigation from the websites because as many SEO companies and SEO consultants know the links, navigations and URL’s of the website is used by the search engine bots as the bridge to crawl the website and gather enough data for the central engine to process. If the navigation of a web page is poor due to broken links then the search engine crawlers will not be able to gather enough data about the target website which could compromise the indexing or ranking of such target website.
In order to increase or optimise the navigation of you’re website SEO companies and SEO consultants suggests the following:
1. Plan the structure of your web pages’ navigation and place appropriate labels where specific files and pages will be found, make sure that the folder where the files will be incorporated will be properly and relevantly labelled.
2. Increase visitor convenience by incorporating breadcrumb lists, a breadcrumb list is a row of internal links which is found either at the top or bottom of the page for purposes of quick navigation back to the previous pages that were visited by the user.
3. Prepare two sitemaps, one for the visitor and one for the search engine. For visitor’s sitemap it is a list of the different pages that the user could visit. For the search engine sitemap it is an XLM Sitemap which is a file that could be submitted to search engines that would serve as a map for the web crawlers to follow.
Following these three guidelines have time and again proven that optimising a website’s navigation would contribute in the increase of the website’s ranking both in page ranking and in the SERP.
Whether SEO companies and SEO consultants like it or not the main target search engine for every SEO campaign would be the search engine giant, Google, which is due to the fact that Google is the foremost search engine and it is used by millions of people daily worldwide making it a search engine that is a good source of traffic for the target website. It is common knowledge among SEO companies and SEO consultants that every search engines’ algorithm is always kept a secret leaving the SEO companies and SEO consultants in the “dark” with regards to how to rank high and fast in the search engine results page of a particular search engine. This is the reason why many have resorted to researching and experimenting in order to find at least the best way to optimise their website.
Google in its effort to help many internet marketers and entrepreneurs online has released a simple basic SEO guideline that SEO companies and SEO consultants can follow in order to have a decent Google ranking. Among the tips that Google has shared in their Webmaster Central is the relevance or importance of using page titles or the title tag in the webpages. Title tags are important because of the fact that the page title is being utilised by search engines in properly displaying the search engine results page. It is because of this fact the importance of the page title is given much importance. Google has outlined three strategies that SEO consultants and SEO companies could use in dealing with the optimisation of the page title and these are:
To make the page title be a source where it will accurately describe the web page’s content, therefore, one must avoid the incorporation of unrelated description or keywords into the page title. Another one is to make each of the pages’ title unique, this is in order to help Google distinguish one site from another.
Finally the title must be concise, that is descriptive as well as brief this is in order for Google to display your website in the search engine results page ranking properly.
Most often than not there are elements in a website that is or that are being ignored when implementing as search engine optimisation campaign. This may be because of the fact that the effect of optimising such element is way less than what is gained from other SEO techniques. However, for Google and other search engines there should be no reason to divert from the basic elements of search engine optimisation. One of the elements that is constantly ignored by many SEO companies and SEO consultants is the meta description tag. This tag or element does not deliver a direct effect on to the web page or website nor does it greatly affect the search engine results page ranking of a target website. The Meta Description element however is very useful because of the fact that this tag contains the summary on what the website is all about, unlike for a title tag the meta description tag can accommodate longer descriptions of about one to two sentences. The contents of the meta tag description is that Google may utilised snippets of the description when displaying your website URL in the search engine results page.
When writing the description or when using the meta description tag since it is also a factor being considered by search engines one must exercise caution so as not to be flagged as a spam website. The following are some guidelines that SEO companies and SEO consultants use when writing the content of the meta description element.
First write a meta description content that will accurately summarise the web pages’ content. This means that an SEO company should avoid writing irrelevant and unrelated description, avoid generic descriptions, avoid using only the keywords as the meta tag content, avoid copying the and placing the entire content of the web page and placing it on your own. Finally you should write unique descriptions for every page in order to accurately describe the contents of a specific webpage.
We’ve all felt the pain of Internet Explorer and we all know its a truly horrible browser for any developers with its completely “out there” standards to every other main stream browser.
And most specifically we’ve all wondered “How the hell do I get IE7 to allow floating elements with overflow hidden?”
Its actually very very simple to fix this, what seems like a bit of a silly bug to leave in a mainstream browser.
To fix this issue all you have to do is attach the below code to the container
#element_name{
position:relative;
}
And it really is as simple as that to fix the error, all praise position:relative!
Search engine optimisation is always said to be a very tedious process because of the fact that there are a lot of processes and strategies involved in order to attain a single goal. It is like making every part in your system work efficiently to make the whole machine to work, SEO is made up of different processes that should be performed or implement properly in order to realise positive outcome. With the numerous types of processes or techniques and strategies involved in search engine optimisation, not to mention the huge number of competition many SEO companies and SEO consultants sometimes would get discouraged and thus forcing them to resort into black hat techniques in order to get results fast but risking the target website to possibilities of suspension or ban from the different search engines when such black hat techniques are discovered. One very important element when tackling an SEO campaign is without resorting to black hat techniques is to organise your SEO campaign properly.
Organising your SEO campaign can start by outlining the general processes or strategies that you will be implementing in your SEO campaign this is in order to give SEO companies and SEO consultants like you a definite direction which you could of course modify depending on the circumstances like algorithm changes among other factors. The following are the basic steps or processes that are done in implementing an SEO campaign:
1. Keyword Research – this step is considered a cornerstone of an SEO campaign as this would determine one of your end goal and that is what search term would you like to have a good rank at.
2. Organise the search terms and build your website pages revolving around the research related search terms.
3. Integrate Relevant and Fresh Content as much as possible dedicate a page in your website where you can continuously update the content.
4. Build links – This involves validating internal and external links as well as building inbound links from related websites.
5. SEO Maintenance – This involves the interpretation of SEO analytics data and doing something about it especially if the analytics shows that parts of your website are decreasing in traffic or keyword authority.
This Tutorial will go through how to create an attractive, shaded background in photoshop to place text, banner ads or logos onto.
Start by creating a new document in Photoshop, say 300px x 200px, then create a new layer and fill with any colour to fit the entire canvas.
Now open up the new layers styles by double clicking on the layer itself in the layers window. Select Colour Overlay and add a nice rich colour, I have used #b22727. Play around with the colour picker to find a nice blend for yourself. Tip: I add the actual colour I want to use as a colour overlay because you are then able to see the colour of your object change.
Once added, go to the Inner Shadow option and add an inner shadow at Opacity: 50%, Distance: 0, Choke: 0 and Size: 105. Click Ok and then create another new layer, select a colour slightly lighter than the overlay colour you used previously, in the example it is #d83d3d.
Now select the Brush Tool with a 400 diameter size and a faded end, as shown below.
Whilst on the new layer, position the brush horizontally in the center of the canvas but slightly down vertically, as shown below, and click once, this should create a nice shading effect against the inner shadow and your background is done.
